We have had the odd report of tapes reporting the same media guid (even though this should be impossible) and this causes a conflict between either the manually defined labels or barcodes depending on which you use in your environment and can cause all sorts of problems with things like duplicate tape names, inventory jobs not returning the correct tape label or invalid tape names being used when restore jobs ask you to insert a tape.

At this current time we believe that the tapes themselves are the cause of this type of issue issue and the only fix that we have so far been able to suggest (but cannot confirm a fix yet) is try to completely reformat/erase any affected tapes using utilities priovided by your tape drive hardware vendor. Backup Exec Erase jobs do not change the identifiers stored on the tapes themselves, it is possible that something from the hardware vendor might be able to do this.

EDIT: If this does not help please log a formal support case as although we are aware of it, none of the existing customers have allowed us to troubleshoot as far as identifying the cause and provide a proper fix. Please make sure you mention TECH198615 if you do log a formal support case.

One of our customers has the same problem in BE 12.5 SP4. But here sudently the Label names are also the same ?????

I'll try to wipe one of the tapes that reports same media ID (just by running HP Tape Tools on it), and after test, I'll try to create original Label in BE, and check if the Media ID is still the same. I'll post result.

Same problem. Removed one of the tapes, completly ! Then add'et it again, labled it with a different name, now tapes with same media ID all are called the new name. How can BE generate a new media ID ?

I am having this problem today. 12 new tapes, 3 of them managed to show as a new tape. Change the label on them and any tape inserted after that showed as the same label. (i.e. i named on January and the rest showed as january with the same media ID). Tried cleaning the drive as well as formatting the tapes with the same result. Everytime I inventory I get the same Media ID. Old tapes do not have this issue. Can only assume it is the tapes problem, but it is the same brand and model as the tapes that have worked correctly for over a year.

In all of my years, I have never seen this before. Any ideas out of anyone?